3 - The Mutual Shaping of Technoscience and Society

Summary

This chapter is concerned with concrete examples of how the mutual shaping of science, technology, and the social become visible. The ways in which technologies are developed and used is one central instance of this: let's start, then, with three examples of such development.

The first is recent, dating from the time of writing, in 2023. A user on the social media platform Reddit has prompted an artificial intelligence (AI)-based image generator to create a series of selfies of soldiers from throughout history, from Samurai warriors to French soldiers during the First World War. As Jenka Gurfinkel notes in commenting on the images, the result is deeply uncanny for a number of reasons, one of which is the identical way in which each group is depicted as grinning for the camera. Quite aside from the question of whether the battlefield would be a place for smiling selfies, all of the soldiers sport what Gurfinkel describes as the ‘American smile’: the tooth-revealing grin that results when you are asked to say ‘cheese’. These smiles are a result of the training data the AI system was built on, and its reliance on images from the Anglophone internet, where smiling in this way is common. The images are, however, particularly weird if you come from a culture where smiling is done differently, or less frequently. The ways in which emotions are shown are highly specific; to Gurfinkel, as an emigre from Russia to the United States, it grated that all of the different ethnic groups and cultures represented had the same kind of smile. ‘AI dominated by American-influenced image sources’, Gurfinkel writes, ‘is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions’. Particular cultural norms – in this case around what smiling should look like and how emotions are expressed – thus come to shape a technology (such as AI image generators), without acknowledgement that local values are being implicitly universalised.

The second example is older, and concerns the way in which particular technologies may be transported and reinterpreted in new locations. Historian Jean Gelman Taylor tells the story of how Singer sewing machines, after initially being developed in the United States in the 1800s, travelled to the ‘Dutch East Indies’ – occupied Indonesia – in the early 20th century.